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International Microgrant: Village Enterprise Fund

Every time someone buys one of our sweatshop free t-shirts through Skreened, we send a dollar to a liberal policy group in the USA and send another dollar in economic development aid for the developing world. That way, you can have the security of knowing that the shirt on your back was made with respect for the human who made it, but you also can be assured that some money is being directed to the developing nations that desperately need capital.

Until last month, we’d made our overseas economic development donations through Kiva microloans, but then we discovered that the Kiva system involves charging immensely high interest rates to destitute borrowers. Kiva says it can’t do any better than usury, which means we’ll have to do better than Kiva. So this month our donation goes to the Village Enterprise Fund, an organization that distributes microgrants to groups of people living in rural Kenya and Uganda. These groups use the microgrants to start up small businesses while VEF gives them ongoing training in business practices.

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About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

2 thoughts on“International Microgrant: Village Enterprise Fund”

Thank you!! I am a member of the Board of Directors at Village Enterprise Fund. We are most grateful for your support, and for helping to share the word of our work. Indeed, we work with people in the very poorest in rural parts of Kenya and Uganda by helping them start small businesses. These people are not well served by microloans because they’ve never run a small business and lack the confidence to even think they could take out a (high-interest) microloan to run one. The most critical thing they need is business training and personal mentoring, which Village Enterprise Fund provides, along with a small grant of $150 (in two installments as they progress). VEF has started over 20,000 small businesses in over 20 years.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.